It is easy to feel hopeless as a South African.

When we entered office just one year ago, Cape Town’s mayoral committee and I knew that we were taking on a profound responsibility of historical proportions. We were faced with an energy crisis, high unemployment, out-of-control crime and a range of other problems brought on by the failure of the South African state. It was our calling, we felt, to show that problems can be solved and that South Africa can work.

This is what we have set out to do in Cape Town: to manage our city efficiently and effectively such that those who live here can be hopeful about the future. Cape Town can and must work. Capetonians can and must feel like there are opportunities here for them to succeed and prosper.

I realise this sounds like something easy to put on paper but difficult to achieve in reality. Reflecting on one year in office, however, has brought about some realisations that make me feel more optimistic than ever.

While South Africa’s problems are numerous, big and seemingly intractable, most of them have easy solutions. For the most part, they are caused by deliberate policy choices rather than circumstances outside of the state’s control. While frustrating, this makes the solutions more obvious.

Take the energy crisis, for example. Eskom was named the best power utility in the world at the Financial Times’ Global Energy Awards in New York in 2001. Three policy design choices were made thereafter, which have led to Eskom’s decline into chaos and ineffectiveness in just 20 years.

First is the underinvestment in new infrastructure, which has left the country reliant on an ageing coal-fired generation fleet, large sections of which are reaching end-of-life. Second, procurement policies overvalue irrelevant considerations (like race) and undervalue the effectiveness of contracts to actually deliver goods and services to the utility. Finally, for similar reasons, Eskom is facing a dire skills shortage which has drastically diminished its capacity to maintain its infrastructure.

This is, of course, on top of the endemic corruption that has exacerbated each of these problems. Again, it was a choice to allow corruption to develop and flourish unchecked.

In Cape Town, we have chosen to do things differently. Keeping with the theme of energy, we have chosen to start becoming independent of Eskom. We are at an advanced stage of procuring 300MW from independent power producers and have enabled businesses who produce excess energy with generation installations at their premises to sell all of this excess back to the City. Next year, we will procure even more generation capacity (as well as storage) through our dispatchable power tender.

We are on track to offer four or more stages’ worth of load shedding protection to residents by the end of our term in office. This extends the protection already offered by our Steenbras hydroelectric plant, which we have chosen to excellently maintain. Frustratingly, this timeframe could be shortened if the national government were to choose to exempt the City from onerous procurement procedures and other legislative requirements which serve only to prolong the process. I made the case for this exemption (along with a range of other simple interventions to solve the power crisis) in July.

It is not only on load shedding that Cape Town is making smarter decisions to solve national problems.

Faced with the reality of a failing South African Police Service due to ongoing mismanagement at a national level, we budgeted a record R5.4-billion this year to make our city safer. We have deployed 1,200 new Law Enforcement officers to crime hotspots, who have already made 8,500 arrests and helped to bring murder rates down. We have also deployed 100 more officers to the CBD to address increasing crime in this economically crucial area.

We have chosen to advocate for the devolution of more crime-fighting power to our excellent local policing services so that we can support the many hard-working SAPS officers in Cape Town. If we are able to properly gather intelligence, investigate and prepare cases for prosecution, crime will come down in Cape Town even more.

Tenants to owners

We know that affordable, equitable access to decent housing opportunities close to work and schools is a crucial ingredient for Cape Town’s social progress and economic success. Accordingly, the council has approved 1,130 social housing units since May and 800 units are actively under construction.

Because we believe no one should be a permanent tenant of the state, we have made the policy choice (which is unusual in South Africa) to make it as easy as possible for tenants to become owners of their council housing, without having to pay anything towards the transfer costs.

Another crucial ingredient of progress and economic growth is reliable and affordable public transport. Faced with the just about complete collapse of commuter rail in Cape Town due to Prasa’s incompetence, we have chosen to pursue the devolution of passenger trains to the City. This process is supported in the national Government’s new rail policy and is now well under way.

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A pressing problem across the country is crumbling civil infrastructure due to chronic underinvestment and maintenance backlogs. We have chosen to significantly increase our infrastructure investment and to make sure we have the engineers and project managers to deliver these projects on time.

We are focusing our investment on where it really counts: infrastructure that improves the lives for residents, especially in poor communities, and infrastructure that helps grow the economy. Water and sewerage projects will be soaking up half the nearly R30-billion we plan to spend on infrastructure over the next three years. This will provide a more dignified life to those living in poverty and will support the further rapid growth of our city that is needed to get them out of poverty.

While we are incredibly proud of our progress, we know there is more to be done. Unemployment is the primary social issue facing our city, and drives almost every other problem. We must grow our economy meaningfully and faster over time and get more Capetonians into work.

Cape Town mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis says the City is on track to offer four or more stages’ worth of protection from rolling blackouts. (Photo: Leila Dougan)

Over the next year we will be focusing our efforts on making Cape Town the best place to do business on the African continent. While excellent basic service delivery will be the biggest means to this end, we will also be working with businesses to figure out how we can make it easier for them to grow and employ more people.

Again, it is a choice to align a government’s agenda with what is needed for businesses to grow and succeed. For us, this choice is an obvious one.

I hope that governments in the rest of the country (and the national government especially) will join us in placing growth and progress at the forefront of their agendas, and abandon failed ideas that have been shown to lead only to poverty and chaos. Regardless of whether this happens, Cape Town will continue to choose to be a City of Hope for all who live here and show that South Africa really can work if we want it to. DM

Geordin Hill-Lewis is mayor of Cape Town. Hill-Lewis was a participant on a panel at Daily Maverick’s The Gathering and this essay is an extension of comments made then.